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anxiety is about perceived danger, which is different from actual danger. When we act based solely on nervous feelings, our worlds can become very small. Our desperate attempt to avoid discomfort and uncertainty fuels anxiety, and avoidance locks it in place. Yet we can take back control. We can learn to face our fears rather than running from them.

Dr. Dawn Huebner, a clinical psychologist in private practice, she treats children with a variety of emotional, behavioral and developmental concerns.

One in four American women takes psychiatric medication, compared with one in seven men. Julie Holland, a New York psychiatrist, thinks that’s “insane.” In “Moody Bitches,” she advises women to accept the wisdom of their hormone fluctuations and not medicate their moods away with drugs like Prozac or Xanax. She argues that “women’s emotionality is normal. It is a sign of health, not disease, and it is our single biggest asset.” Her authority for this claim is not science, but feminine spirituality. “Reclaiming your authentic, natural self is liberating. It is wholesome and it is healing.” Adding a touch of sociobiology, she continues: “By evolutionary design, women’s brains have developed to encourage empathy, intuition, emotionality, and sensitivity.”

Some people are naturally more anxious than others.
A brain-imaging study in monkeys provides surprising insights into which brain regions are under the influence of genes in this phenomenon and which are not.

All the DSM disorders overlap with one another and frequently also with normality.
For example, there is no clear boundary between bipolar and unipolar mood disorder, between anxiety and depression, even between schizophrenic and psychotic mood disorders, and so on throughout all the sections.

“There’s a vast encyclopedia of fears and phobias,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “and pretty much any object, experience, situation you can think of, there is someone who has a phobia of it.”

Stossel’s own fears include turophobia, a fear of cheese; asthenophobia, a fear of fainting; and claustrophobia.
His new book, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, is both a memoir and a history of how medicine, philosophy and the pharmaceutical industry have dealt with anxiety.

There is no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of dispair can be the engine of intimacy.

There are 3 things people tend to confuse:

depression

grief

sadness

What causes some people to be more resilient than other people?

You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness. And that now you are seeing it truly.

As I unwrapped the picture, I began to cry. And my mother came over and said “Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew? And I said, “She had the same disease I have.” I’m crying now … It’s not that I’m so sad, but I get overwhelmed …

21:27 That’s all I need now.

People come over to me and say “I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this.” And I always say to them, “You may get through it, but you’ll never be 37 again.”

It’s a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use the same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe hwo somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

What is the mechanism of resilience?
tolerate the fact that …

I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, …